Salt Rim
by awesomesen
Summary: Cloud's just a little kid, you know? On the run, Zack considers. [gen]


_I have a friend who loves Final Fantasy 7, and Zack by extension. Now, I have nothing against the game - I played it addictively like everyone else - but the fandom is a place I had always sort of hoped to steer clear of. Nevertheless. My friend requested that I write her a 'fic with Zack in it as payment for her beta-reading. Since I owe her one, I agreed. _

_This story was beta-read by **cupcakegirl**, and is dedicated to - and written for - **oen shei**. _

_Please enjoy this story. _

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**salt rim**

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Cloud's eyes were _different_ now, blue tinged with green, sharp bright like a neon sign was leaking out of his head through the eyeballs, a glowing sign of Mako and SOLDIER and, worse, JENOVA. Brighter than SOLDER's eyes, sharper and less focused, like a flash of color leaking over the seams. Zack knew his eyes mirrored Cloud's, that he shared the same blurry sharp blueness, more vividly then he'd had before when he was just a SOLDIER. But it didn't bother him when it was him. 

But Cloud was just a _kid_, shit, a little dreamer kid who had blushingly admitted once that he really did want to be a SOLDIER, Mr. Zack Sir, but--um, well...

Zack had seen a drink once the color of Cloud's eyes, toxic bright blue. It had been alcoholic and served in a shallow glass with a salt rim, and he had wondered at the time what they had put in it to make it that color. That bright glowing Mako-JENOVA-ShinRa-test tubes _let's get out of here please _color. But the party had been a while ago, and Zack had just accredited it to food coloring. It probably had just been something innocent like that. Maybe not--had it really been so long ago? Years--fuck, years, yes, years and years ago everyone probably thought he was dead: Zack for the first time in his life craved a newspaper.

Pointless to think this way. Cloud had been a kid when they caught him, a kid with normal blue eyes and messy blond hair and a weird shyness and weirder aggression, there had been something a little--weird--unstable about him, but Zack saw Cloud look at Sephiroth with those blue eyes and he had thought of stuff like pathetic puppies and those straggly white flowers Aerith loved so much. Kinda off putting, but he had liked the way Cloud looked up to him, too, a great excuse to seem high and mighty and _SOLDIER First Class Zack_. Take the kid under your wing, have someone to tease. Different from a friend. Cloud's uniform had been a little too big, and he had looked even younger than he had been.

It really must have been years. Cloud looked like an adult now. Despite the eye's-neon and whatever other shit ShinRa had pumped into them, JENOVA and Mako and Orange Juice, for all Zack knew, Cloud had somehow grown up. He didn't look like a kid anymore. He was taller, thicker... deader.

Zack kept wanting to take the his pulse. Stopping to rest in a clearing for the night was too obvious, so he had dragged them both through some scrub, into the center of a palace of scrub, bushtropolis, hedgecity, prickly and scratchy and uncomfortable and hidden. Zack would have liked to go and make a few false trails through the forest, but he was still a little weak and he didn't yet trust himself to be able to find Cloud again if he left. So instead he had chopped away some of the branches to make them a little room, propped Cloud up against a wall of leaves and twigs, and started hoping that the ShinRa weren't too good at tracking down escaped science experiments.

He didn't think about it. Zack refused to think about it, even for a second, none of it. The odds of his and Cloud's survival, the purpose of the experiments, the amount of time gone, Sephiroth--nothing. Zack's mind was a SOLDIER-free zone. There was a full moon. His sword (stolen back from ShinRa, thank you very much) shone dully. Cloud's eyes, half open, seemed to glow.

He was slumped in on himself, Cloud, the effort of even sitting too much to bear. Shoulders curved in, arms limp, head bent so that his chin almost touched his collarbone. Zack wanted to rearrange Cloud, prop him up. He looked like a rag-doll. He looked like a grownup, but he was more of a kid than ever, and there was something obscene about the way his legs lay so limply on the ground.

"Way I figure it," Zack said, not so much being friendly and talking to his companion as easing his own nerves, "we passed Cosmo Canyon last night. We're getting pretty close to my hometown, you know? Maybe we'll stop in an' meet my folks." That would be nice. That would--oh, hell, he was too old for this, the sudden burst of thick emotion, a twist in his stomach, that crappy old bed and his old parents and that tiny little pessimistic village, always depressed and always worn. He'd give a lot right now to go home and crawl into his tiny cot, blankets nesting him in, his mother needling him about how badly he needed a haircut and his father--"Yeah, they'd get a kick out of you, Cloud. Mom'd feed you 'til you're fat and ugly, Dad'd love you cause you're so quiet..." (Cloud didn't reply, he hadn't replied, he had managed to live and act until they were fifteen miles from Nibelhelm, then he had crashed and curled in on himself, free of Mako and unable to act without it, he was a breathing husk, and the addiction wouldn't fade for at least another few weeks) "We should go visit them, what do you say?"

Of course they wouldn't. ShinRa would find them within two days. They were probably already at the village, waiting. Zack's hometown was in the official records, after all. They'd go to Midgar. The only place they could go, the only place two wanted escapees could hide was under ShinRa's very noses. The slums had dangers, but ShinRa had never been one of them.

"Can't wait to see my folks again!" Zack said brightly. Cloud seemed to slump over further, a minute reaction. His folks were dead, gone, burned. So was his village. So was everyone he knew. Maybe Zack was imagining that reaction. Cloud was basically a dead fish. He couldn't hear a word, let alone understand it. It was so wrong, somehow, that Zack couldn't help but try and attribute some sort of human emotions to this thing that had once been an overeager kid.

A rustle somewhere close. Crickets abruptly stopped humming, and Zack jumped to attention. Maybe it was nothing. A passing monster. Or... "Say, buddy, what do you say you get some sleep?" Zack said cheerfully, whisperingly, shuffling across their clearing and helping Cloud move. Arranging Cloud in a slightly less vulnerable position. "I'm just gonna go take a piss," Zack said. He took his sword with him when he crawled out of their shelter. Cloud wouldn't be able to use it anyway.

It would really be best to start walking. Cloud slowed them down. Made them more obvious. One man traveling wouldn't raise suspicion. One man traveling with a second man who could barely muster the strength to open his eyes, however, was very suspicious. They moved slowly, they stopped often, they'd traveled in eight days a distance that Zack could have managed in three. Cloud was half dead, Cloud was probably dying, and ShinRa was always alarmingly close behind them. Zack didn't even have to recall his training to know the logical answer to this problem. But...

The rustle in the bushes again, and in the utter silence of the forest Zack could hear quiet clearly an better giveaway of the sound's maker: a faint burst of static from a portable radio, behind him and slightly to the left. Zack knew better than to make the first move, and let his walking become more obvious, louder. Let ShinRa's goons come to _him_. _He _wasn't going to charge into any trap. Zack was just admiring the nighttime views of the forest. The trees and bushes and--trees. Zack was just taking a pleasant midnight stroll, that was all (start walking).

He should. He should stroll. He should stroll himself straight out of this forest, stroll himself right on over the ocean to Midgar. Stroll himself right away, far away, alone. Zack adjusted his sword slightly on his back, to let him grab it quicker when the inevitable attack came. He should forget about Cloud and their little bush fort. But...

A twig snapped, then another. The ShinRa grunts had stopped caring about silence and secrecy. Zack wished idly that he had some materia.

...It was just that Cloud was still just a kid, really, a snotty little kid with one hell of a mako allergy, with bright blue eyes that were now tinged with green, green like Sephiroth's eyes had been, green like materia and neon and--and a bad drink at a party. Just a kid. A little kid with hopeful hurt-puppy-scrawny-stem eyes, who stammered shyly when Sephiroth addressed him and who had been so happy to hear that Zack had gotten him assigned to the Nibelhelm mission with them (_I'll be useful, sir! I--I grew up there, you know, maybe I can show you around or--). _Crazy little kid who had charged Sephiroth and lived, somehow, was the last person to ever see Sephiroth and had lived past it, past the wounds and the burns and JENOVA, all things from a mission that Zack had specially arranged for him to go on, all things that Zack had pulled strings to let Cloud get. No time for guilt. No need for guilt.

Zack unsheathed his sword calmly as the first of the three ShinRa grunts charged him.

It would just be wrong to leave a little kid all alone like that, you know?

(_and we're friends, right?_)

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End file.
